Celestia icon
Celestia icon

Celestia

 125 likes

Celestia is an application for real-time 3D visualization of space, with a detailed model of the solar system, over 100,000 stars, more than 10,000 galaxies, and an extension mechanism for adding more objects.

The orbits of a number of main belt asteroids (in brown) plotted together with major planet orbits (in blue).

License model

  • Free • Open Source

Application type

Country of Origin

  • US flagUnited States

Platforms

  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Linux
  • PortableApps.com
  • Android
  • iPhone
  • iPad
  • visionOS
A closeup of the space shuttle Discovery in orbit over Florida; this shot demonstrates Celestia's virtual texture feature for extremely high resolution mapping of planets.
The 1989 flyby of Neptune by Voyager 2--last stop before leaving the solar system.
Celestia alternatives  
5 / 5 Avg rating (2)
125likes
3comments
29alternatives
0news articles

Features

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  1.  Portable

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Celestia information

  • Developed by

    US flagChris Laurel

  • Licensing

    Open Source (GPL-2.0) and Free product.

  • Written in

  • Rating

    Average rating of 5

  • Alternatives

    29 alternatives listed

  • Supported Languages

    • English
    • Arabic
    • Belarusian
    • Bulgarian
    • Dutch
    • French
    • Galician
    • Georgian
    • German
    • Greek
    • Hungarian
    • Italian
    • Japanese
    • Korean
    • Latvian
    • Lithuanian
    • Norwegian Bokmål
    • Polish
    • Portuguese
    • Romanian
    • Russian
    • Chinese
    • Slovak
    • Spanish
    • Swedish
    • Turkish
    • Ukrainian

AlternativeTo Category

Education & Reference

Apple AppStore

  •   Updated Jun 2, 2025
  •   4.3 avg rating

GitHub repository

  •  2,004 Stars
  •  323 Forks
  •  153 Open Issues
  •   Updated Jun 17, 2025 
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Our users have written 3 comments and reviews about Celestia, and it has gotten 125 likes

Celestia was added to AlternativeTo by RemovedUser on Apr 15, 2009 and this page was last updated Oct 14, 2024.

Comments and Reviews

   
 Post comment/review
Top Positive Comment
Miguel Angelo Santos Bicudo
★
★
★
★
★
Jun 15, 2019
0

Very nice software to explore the universe. Runs on my older computer.

Guest
★
★
★
★
★
May 10, 2018
0

The best simulator out there I've seen, though I have not seen the one it led to, who's name I forget. It's of real use.

Melroy van den Berg
Nov 14, 2013
0

I love this software very much! However it seems the website/forum is not available. I think the developers stopped the software. The latest release was also from 2011. Too bad :(

What is Celestia?

Celestia is a free real-time 3D space simulation, allowing unrestricted access to hundreds of thousands of stars.

Celestia ... The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit. Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects. 3rd-Party content is also available to expand the virtual universe.

Official Links

AppStores & Other Links

Download from Mac App Store
Download from Microsoft Store
Download from Google Play Store

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